Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
-- Flannery O'Connor, Journal, 1946
Her prayer journal, which she kept for only one year as a college student, reveals an inner life seeking God. She earnestly desired that her writing be service to God: Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing published for Christian principles to permeate, she wrote. But her seeking God was neither "pious" nor sweet -- it was rough and honest:
I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive....My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be....I would like to write a beautiful prayer, but I have nothing to do it from. There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted. I am not a philosopher or I could understand these things.
Even as a twenty-year old college student, O'Connor consecrated her life to God, asking that He lead her where she should go. She feared remaining in church because of laziness or fear of hell; she wanted more of God than she deserved to ask, in her opinion. She was often discouraged about her work, but wholly believed that it was God who directed her in it:
Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story -- just like the typewriter was mine.....dear God, I wish you would take care of making it a sound story because I don't know how, just like I didn't know how to write it but it came.
O'Connor's honesty and humility inspire me as much as her stories. One of the funniest and yet most inspiring books I have read is The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters to friends and acquaintances. Reading this book often sent me into peals of laughter, even though I was reading it in bed late at night. O'Connor's unpretentious ways of seeing life were a reflection of her honest appraisal of her own weaknesses and those of others, and yet of her absolute faith that God is with us through it all. Once, someone asked her opinion of the feminist movement, still in its very infancy. Her reply was that she had never thought to divide the world into "male" and "female" categories; rather, she said, she tended to divide people into "irksome" and "not so irksome" labels. Now, that's honest!
Through Flannery O'Connor's eyes, the world tends to be set upright and its falsity exposed. In contact with her, through her letters, her stories, and her prayers, I begin to see things sometimes the way I imagine God might see them, could I consult Him.
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